Jeffrey Weiss is a reporter for The
Dallas Morning News.His coverage is
the Richardson area, and he was reporting on the Richardson Independent School
District board races.

Weiss got from candidate Raj Chari that “he was in favor of the teaching of
Creationism in science classes.”Karen
Holburn is the incumbent at that board position, and Weiss asked her the ID
question.Here is what Weiss had to say
about the responses he received:

Holburn’s first response:

Trustees need to focus on the academic success of
every child in our district and not push personal agendas. The State Board of Education
sets the curriculum for our schools and it is my job as a Trustee to ensure
that the teachers are provided the resources they need to teach the curriculum.

The response was not satisfactory to this Newsreporter, so he followed up,
saying, in part, “[Y]ou have not answered the question.”Further, “Do you agree or disagree with your
opponent that Intelligent Design (or Creationism) should be taught in science
classes in the Richardson school district?”

Weiss received the following response
from Holburn:

The State Board of Education sets the curriculum
for our schools and it is my job as a Trustee to ensure that the teachers are
provided the resources they need to teach the curriculum. The issue of teaching
Creationism in science classes has not been voiced by our community. As
Trustees, if this did become an issue within our community we would collaborate
with community members, administrators, and teachers to study what the
district’s position should be and proceed from there.

Weiss’s take is, “To which I say: She has still not answered my question.
Unless the answer is that, for one of the major hot-button issues in public
education of the past century-plus, she has no position beyond what she thinks
the community wants. Which is her right. But seems odd.”

Darryl Smyers is a candidate for another board seat in the district, and he
read Weiss’s post about the issue on The Dallas Morning News blog.He contributed the following response to
Weiss:

Creationism is not a scientific theory so it cannot
be taught in a science class.

Weiss:“How clear is that? “

How clear, indeed.

The North Texas Skeptics is a 501 (c) 3, non-profit, tax-exempt
organization, and, as such, we do not venture into politics.However, we feel it our obligation to inform
members and the public whenever people vying for the public trust (and dollar)
are going off on a tangent and placing superstition and reliance on woo-woo
beliefs ahead of established science and their public responsibilities.

…45% of Americans in 2008 answered true to the
statement, “Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species
of animals.”

That was news to me.I would have thought it was closer to 15%,
because 15% is closer to zero than 45% is.

In Japan it was 78%, Europe in general, 70%, China, 69%, and South Korea
64%.What is so amazing to a person of
my age is I remember when Japan was bombed nearly back to the stone age by this
country, Europe nearly became the an empire of Nazi Neanderthals and South
Korea came close to becoming southern North Korea. Since then Japan dug itself
out of the ashes, Europe rebuilt itself nearly block by block, South Korea held
off the North with the help of thousands of United States troops to become an
Asian powerhouse and China shook off a medieval economic structure.Meanwhile, the country that suffered none of
these hardships sank into an intellectual backwater.Only 33% of Americans agree the universe
began with the Big Bang.

Good going, guys.

Anyhow, you won’t read this in a recent report from the National Science
Foundation (NSF).According to an item
in Science the NSF decided to sidestep the inconvenient truth.1

In an unusual last-minute edit that has drawn flak
from the White House and science educators, a federal advisory committee
omitted data on Americans’ knowledge of evolution and the big bang from a key
report. The data shows that Americans are far less likely than the rest of the
world to accept that humans evolved from earlier species and that the universe
began with a big bang.

They’re not surprising findings, but the National
Science Board, which oversees the National Science Foundation (NSF), says it
chose to leave the section out of the 2010 edition of the biennial Science and
Engineering Indicators because the survey questions used to measure knowledge
of the two topics force respondents to choose between factual knowledge and
religious beliefs.

A similar survey in 2004 showed 44% of Americans accepted the facts of human
origins, and it was still 78% for Japanese, 70% for Chinese and Europeans and
60% for South Koreans.“Only in Russia
did less than half (44%) of respondents answer true.”

We’re behind the rest of the world in basic science and also “lag in other
science and mathematical education. Nearly Half of Adults in the USA Don’t Know
How Long it Takes the Earth to Circle the Sun.”Which makes one wonder, “Does anybody really know what time it is?”
(Does anybody really care?) 2

A recent study of 20 years of survey data collected
by NSF concluded that “many Americans accept pseudoscientific beliefs,” such as
astrology, lucky numbers, the existence of unidentified flying objects (UFOs),
extrasensory perception (ESP), and magnetic therapy (Losh et al. 2003). Such
beliefs indicate a lack of understanding of how science works and how evidence
is investigated and subsequently determined to be either valid or not.
Scientists, educators, and others are concerned that people have not acquired
the critical thinking skills they need to distinguish fact from fiction. The
science community and those whose job it is to communicate information about
science to the public have been particularly concerned about the public’s
susceptibility to unproven claims that could adversely affect their health,
safety, and pocketbooks.

Science writer Simon Sing, along with Edzard Ernst, wrote Trick or Treatment: The Undeniable Facts about Alternative Medicine.It’s a book that, as the title says, exposes
the unfortunate truth about many alternative medical practices.Acupuncture, homeopathy, chiropractic and
herbal medicine, among others, come in for treatment.You can get your copy from Amazon.com.3

He also managed to tick some people off.

In April 2008 Sing wrote an article that mentioned the British Chiropractic
Association (BCA) was promoting bogus medical treatments.These included treatments for asthma, colic
and earache.Unfortunately this was in
merry old England, and not in the U.S.A.

United States libel laws are lenient to writers (freedom of the press and
all that stuff).You can disparage
somebody in print, and if it’s true, they can go suck a goat, but the court is
not going to give them relief.If it’s
not true, you can still escape a court challenge if you can show an honest (not
egregiously careless) mistake has been made.Then you might have to apologize.In any event, the subject of your scorn has to prove your statements are
false.

The BCA complained, and Singh refused to retract or to apologize.The BCA sued in British courts, which place a
heavier burden on the writer.

In May British Justice Eady ruled Singh’s
statements were “allegations of fact” rather than opinions, forcing him to
prove his statements were true.His
projected legal costs exceeded £100,000, but he did not back down.More recently, a three-judge panel overruled
Justice Eady and agreed that Sing’s statements amounted to opinion,
considerably lessening his burden of proof.

The judges did more.

In a judgement that was highly critical of both the
BCA and Mr Justice Eady, they said: “This litigation has almost certainly had a
chilling effect on public debate which might otherwise have assisted potential
patients to make informed choices about the possible use of chiropractic.”

By rejecting the newspaper’s offer to print a reply
from the association, and by suing Dr Singh personally, the Appeal Court judges
said “the unhappy impression has been created that this is an endeavour by the
BCA to silence one of its critics”.

They were scathing of the ruling by Mr Justice
Eady, who has previously been accused of trying to single-handedly bring in a
privacy law by the back door.

They said: “His approach marginalised or underrated
the value now placed by the law on public debate on issues of public concern.”

In treating Dr Singh’s words as an assertion of
fact rather than comment, he had “erred in his approach”, they said.

“However one represents or paraphrases their
meaning,” they said of Dr Singh’s words, they “are in our judgement expressions
of opinion.”

If the case were allowed to continue on the track
Mr Justice Eady’s decision had set in motion – with the BCA attempting to prove
its treatments worked for those ailments named, and Dr Singh attempting to
prove such evidence was flawed – that would “invite the court to become an Orwellian
ministry of truth”, they said.

The judges called for scientific debates to be
resolved using science, not libel writs.

They also recommended that fair comment be renamed
“honest opinion” as this “would lend greater emphasis to its importance as an essential
ingredient of the right to free expression”.

Singh is not out of the woods yet, but BCA faces a steeper hill to climb
than before.They are reconsidering
their position.BCA president Richard
Brown said:

“Our original argument remains that our reputation
has been damaged. To reiterate, the BCA brought this claim only to uphold its
good name and protect its reputation, honesty and integrity.”

Financier John Templeton pioneered mutual funds and made a great
fortune.From Wikipedia “As a member of
the Presbyterian Church, Templeton was dedicated to his faith. However,
Templeton remained open to the benefits and values of other faiths.”

The Templeton Foundation awards a prize to “proliferate the monetary support
of spiritual discoveries.”

According to Templeton:

We are trying to persuade people that no human has
yet grasped 1% of what can be known about spiritual realities. So we are
encouraging people to start using the same methods of science that have been so
productive in other areas, in order to discover spiritual realities.

… In the past, Templeton has supported conferences
and projects linked to the Discovery Institute, an ID think tank. But it
subsequently disavowed support for the ID movement, allaying the fears of many
critics. This week, the foundation took another step in that direction by
awarding its annual $1.5 million Templeton Prize to Francisco Ayala, a
priest-turned-biologist who for decades has campaigned against the teaching of
creationism and ID in the science classroom.

The 76-year-old Ayala, a professor at the
University of California, Irvine, has sought to foster mutual respect between
science and religion through lectures and writings on topics such as morality.
“If they are properly understood, they cannot be in contradiction because
science and religion concern different matters,” says Ayala, a former president
of AAAS (publisher of Science). He
says the conflict has grown less intense since Templeton funds helped to launch
a program in the mid-1990s called Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and Religion at
AAAS, which continues to be supported by the foundation. Some scientists
objected at the time, he recalls. “They said, ‘What business does science have
talking to religion?’ I don’t think there are many thoughtful scientists who
would make that point today.”

Scientists have generally been at odds with the Templeton Prize.

They are using the prestige and authority of
science to improve the prestige and credibility of theology,’ says Daniel
Dennett, a philosopher at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. In his
opinion, Templeton-funded discussions between scientists and religious figures
do for religion what debates between ID proponents and evolutionary biologists
would do for ID: “They create the perception that scientists and theologians
are academic co-equals, which they are not.”

Ayala is a long time supporter of the National Center for Science Education
(NCSE).The NCSE is the premier organization
opposing the teaching of creationism in public schools.

May
program

Saturday 15 May
2010

2 p.m.

Darwin’s
Dilemma

Darwin
stated his greatest dilemma with the fossil evidence was the Cambrian
Explosion of life forms that occurred about 530 million years ago.
Creationists make much of this and consider the Cambrian Explosion to be a
fatal flaw in the Darwinian theory of evolution.They have made a video called Darwin’s
Dilemma, and at the May meeting we will critique this latest bit of
creationist propaganda.

Future Meeting Dates

19
June (NTS program meeting)
17 July (NTS program meeting)
21 August (NTS program meeting)
18 September (NTS program meeting)
16 October (NTS program meeting)
13 November (NTS program meeting)

Board Meeting and
Social Dinner

Saturday, 22 May
2010, at 7 p.m.

Sheldrake revisited

by John Blanton

Oops!

Back in 1998 we took a look at the amazing ideas of Rupert Sheldrake.We said

[Rupert] Sheldrake, Ph.D., is a former Research
Fellow of the Royal Society and was a scholar of Clare College, Cambridge, and
a Frank Knox Fellow at Harvard University. He has been making waves in the
world of New Age ever since his first book A New Science of Life on the scene in 1981. What
the world of science says he’s been making is another matter.1

That was over twelve years ago.We
thought it was about time we took a shot at one of Sheldrake’s challenges.

I was not hankering to get a bunch of homing pigeons and release them over
the countryside.Neither did I want to
dredge up a bunch of termites and organize them into a committee.(Secretly, I wished them all dead.)

The sense of being stared at seemed to be about our speed.For our April program we would test whether
any of us could tell when we were being stared at.

Rupert Sheldrake is on the Internet, and wondrously he has arranged for
readers to run tests of their own on his Web site.2

Sheldrake’s on-line test has a straight-forward protocol:3

1. Fill in the User information (all entries MUST
be completed). As part of this registration process there is a sound test. If
your computer does not make a sound when you press the test button, you will
need to signal the beginning of each trial to the subject by means of a
mechanical click or beep.(Note: there may be a delay of several seconds between
pressing the sound test button and the beep.)

2. Click on the Begin Experiment button

3. Follow the Instructions for Staring and/or Not
Staring. If you computer does not give a sound signal, signal the beginning of
the trial to the subject by means of a mechanical click or beep

4. Ask the subject to respond ‘Looking’ or ‘Not
looking’. It is best to guess quite quickly, within 5-10 seconds.

5. If the subject’s response is correct, enter
Correct, and if it is incorrect, enter Incorrect.

6. You can do the experiment with or without
feedback. If you decide to give trial-by-trial feedback to the subject, tell
him or her if the guess is right or wrong

7. When all 20 trials are complete, submit the data
for permanent storage

8. You can then either log off, do the test again
with the same subject and looker, or switch roles

This was particularly gratifying, so the big demonstration was started at
the April meeting.All present watched
intently as I brought up the Web page and projected it on the official NTS Flat
Screen Display (NTSFSD).

I clicked on the link that said Begin the Staring Experimentat the bottom of
the page.Up came a form for me to fill
out.I entered all the information and
clicked Begin Experiment.

Oops!What was supposed to happen
when I clicked the link was this:On
Sheldrake’s Web server the link was supposed to activate a Perl CGI script that
would engage me in a dialog and compose appropriate Web pages to lead me
through the test.What happened,
instead, is the Sheldrake server didn’t execute the script.Instead, it just sent the page to my browser,
and my audience suddenly saw all the Perl script code displayed on the
screen.And that was the end of the
test.Not what we had hoped for.

Fortunately we didn’t go into the meeting relying only on the on-line test
for entertainment.Prior to the meeting
I prepared a PowerPoint presentation that recapitulated our previous review of
Sheldrake’s amazing world view.For
those who skipped the April meeting I have placed the PowerPoint on-line.There is also a copy of the CGI script for
those of you who want to dissect it and recreate the test for themselves.Give me a few more days, and I will have this
done and will place the test on the NTS Web site.4

When you read the script you will notice it was written by Charles
Overby.A quick check on the Internet
shows the following:The Sense of Being
Stared At - An Automated Test on the Internet, Journal of the Society for
Psychical Research, (2008) 72, 86-97, Rupert Sheldrake, Charles Overby and
Ashwin Beeharee.5

The abstract reads as follows:6

In previous research on the sense of being stared
at, participants worked in pairs, with the starer behind the staree. In a
series of 20 randomized trials, the starer looked or did not look at the
staree, who had to guess ‘looking’ or ‘not looking’. We here describe an
exploratory automated, internet-based version of this standard staring
experiment. In 498 tests, each with 20 trials, the computer gave an automatic
sound signal to indicate when each trial began. The average hit rate was 53.0%
(p < 1 10-6); 268 participants scored above the chance level of 10 out of
20, 150 below, and 80 at the chance level. There was no significant difference
between male and female starees, and little effect of starees’ age. The highest
hit rates were with parent-child participants. Hit rates were significantly
higher when starees received trial-by-trial feedback, but there was no increase
in the second half of the test compared with the first. Although these tests
were unsupervised, the results replicated many of the features of previous
tests and illustrate the potential for carrying out research through the
internet, enabling widespread participation.

The results appear impressive, except...Except with psychical research science takes a slightly different
slant.One difference is the concept of
“artificial conditions.”I take this to
mean “scientifically rigorous conditions.”In Seven Experiments Sheldrake says, after some
preamble:7

…[T]hey also confirm that most people do not
perform very impressively under artificial conditions.The overall results are better than chance,
but not much better.

In other words, it doesn’t work so well when you look closely.It’s a dodge that we have long seen in this
field of study.